We construct a new family of high genus examples of free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean unit 3-ball by desingularizing the intersection of a coaxial pair of a critical catenoid and an equatorial disk. The surfaces are constructed by singular perturbation methods and have three boundary components. They are the free boundary analogue of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks surfaces and the surfaces constructed by Kapouleas by desingularizing coaxial catenoids and planes. It is plausible that the minimal surfaces we constructed here are the same as the ones obtained recently by Ketover using the min-max method.

We consider a characteristic problem of the vacuum Einstein equations with part of the initial data given on a future asymptotically flat null cone, and show that the solution exists uniformly around the null cone for general such initial data. Therefore, the solution contains a piece of the future null infinity. The initial data are not required to be small and the decaying condition is consistent with those in the works of [8] and [11].

Let k be the algebraic closure of a finite field of odd characteristic p, and X a smooth projective scheme over the Witt ring W (k) which is geometrically connected in characteristic zero. We introduce the notion of Higgs-de Rham flow1 and prove that the category of periodic Higgs-de Rham flows over X/W(k) is equivalent to the category of Fontaine modules, hence further equivalent to the category of crystalline representations of the e ́tale fundamental group π_1(X_K ) of the generic fiber of X, after Fontaine-Laffaille and Faltings, where K is the fraction field of W(k). Moreover, we prove that every semistable Higgs bundle over the special fiber X_k of X of rank ≤ p initiates a semistable Higgs–de Rham flow and thus those of rank ≤ p − 1 with trivial Chern classes induce k-representations of π_1(X_K ). A fundamental construction in this paper is the inverse Cartier transform over a truncated Witt ring. In characteristic p, it was constructed by Ogus–Vologodsky in the nonabelian Hodge theory in positive characteristic; in the affine local case, our construction is related to the local Ogus–Vologodsky correspondence of Shiho.

Let $A$ be a complex, commutative unital Banach algebra. We introduce two notions of exponential reducibility of Banach algebra tuples and present an analogue to the Corach-Suárez result on the connection between reducibility in $A$ and in $C(M(A))$ . Our methods are of an analytical nature. Necessary and sufficient geometric/topological conditions are given for reducibility (respectively reducibility to the principal component of $U_{n}(A)$ ) whenever the spectrum of $A$ is homeomorphic to a subset of $\mathbb{C}^{n}$ .

We introduce a homotopy theory of digraphs (directed graphs) and prove its basic properties, including the relations to the homology theory of digraphs constructed by the authors in previous papers. In particular, we prove the homotopy invariance of homologies of digraphs and the relation between the fundamental group of the digraph and its first homology group. The category of (undirected) graphs can be identified by a natural way with a full subcategory of digraphs. Thus we obtain also consistent homology and homotopy theories for graphs.